


To Chip Away

by unbelieve



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I didn't swear in this one guys are you proud of me, I will address the fact that suki was like a 15/16 year old in a high security prison or die trying, like the hurt happens before this so it's rly just the comfort but hey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:07:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26867878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unbelieve/pseuds/unbelieve
Summary: Suki's spent a lot of time excelling at acting like she's fine. She's a leader; it comes with the territory, and pretending to be fine after escaping the Boiling Rock is just the next logical step. They've all got bigger problems, anyway. Still, it turns out she's not fooling Sokka quite as well as she'd hoped.
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 72





	To Chip Away

It takes Sokka a while to notice Suki’s gone, which he’d prefer to attribute to her stealth skills rather than his own failings. He’s let his guard down a little at the Air Temple, has stopped mentally doing headcounts every couple minutes, although he maybe should resume those with the way people keep disappearing on them (if he and Zuko had been the last ones missing, surely they could be forgiven, since they’d come back with more people than they’d left with).

Either way, he’s halfway through talking to his dad when he looks around at some point and realizes she’s not with the group. “Did you see Suki leave?”

Hakoda takes a second to catch up with the sudden about-face in the conversation, but then he says, “Don’t think so. She can’t have gone far, though, the flying bison’s still here.”

“He has a name, Dad. Did you forget Appa’s name?”

“There have been quite a few new names to keep track of, and aren’t you trying to find your girlfriend?”

Sokka nods. “I’ll be back, I still wanna hear about Kallik spitting on Fire Nation troops.”

“That’s pretty much the whole story,” Hakoda says, but Sokka’s already up and heading off to find Suki.

His dad had been right, there weren’t a lot of places she could’ve gone without some serious climbing, and only a few were out of view from the space where they’d set up camp. There’s a ledge, though, high enough up the cliffside trail that someone could remain unseen, and that seems like as good a guess as any. He follows the path up, sticking close to the cliff wall and, spirits, he’s not particularly afraid of heights, but he still wishes the Air Nomads had built these paths a little wider. Not that they’d needed them, of course, but it would’ve been nice.

He crests the hill, only a little winded, and finds her there with her back to him, staring off into the distance. She doesn’t seem to hear him at first, so he kicks a pebble against the rock face because startling someone on a mountain ledge doesn’t seem like the world’s best idea.

She turns at the noise, already on high alert, and then she relaxes. “Sokka.”

“Hey.” Sokka comes to sit next to her, swinging his legs over the side of the ledge and ignoring just how nervous that makes him. Like with the paths, there’s fear of heights, and there’s a much more reasonable fear of falling miles to your death, and he’s not really ashamed to say he has a healthy dose of the latter. “Just came to check on you. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Of course I am.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I’m fine,” she says, the words a little razor-edged.

But if Sokka doesn’t press, no one else is going to, and it seems like someone needs to. “You were in _prison._ ”

“And now I’m not in prison. So I’m fine.” She’s trying hard enough to be convincing that Sokka almost gives up and believes her, except that he remembers holding her, kneeling on the floor of that cell, her breath catching in her throat and her tears soaking the shoulder of his stolen guard uniform. That, and the fact that she’s out here alone in the first place.

“Alright, fine. I won’t keep bothering you about it, I just… I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep it to yourself, you know?”

“I don’t,” she says, but there’s something in it that tells him to let the quiet stretch out between them, and then she shakes her head a little. “Maybe I do. I don’t want to start breaking down now if I’m not sure I can put myself back together fast enough.”

“You’re not doing it alone.”

“I’m not used to that. Or- I don’t know. It’s different.”

Sokka tips his head and asks, “What do you mean?” and he thinks maybe he knows the particular kind of loneliness she’s talking about, but he can’t be sure.

“I was never alone when I had the rest of the Kyoshi Warriors, but I was their leader, you know? I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t sure of myself because I wanted them to be able to trust me. And I guess they shouldn’t have, but…”

“They absolutely should trust you, are you kidding me? They couldn’t have a better leader.”

Suki looks away, pulling her knee up to her chest and rubbing at a barely visible smudge of dirt on her shoe. “I couldn’t protect them. Not that they can’t protect themselves, I know they can, but I should’ve- I don’t know, I should’ve fought harder. There had to have been something.”

“I know you, okay? I know you would’ve done everything you could, and they know that too, probably even better than I do.”

“I guess,” she says, but she might as well not have said it at all with how little conviction there is behind it.

“I’m serious, it’s not your fault. Losing to Azula and her friends is pretty much a rite of passage around here. They’re scary.”

“I love the way they fight, actually. It was nice to have it not directed at us for once when we were trying to escape.”

“Yeah, I’d kind of like to learn how to throw knives now, but that’s a whole other thing.”

She’s quiet for a minute, looking at something or nothing off in the distance, and then she says, “ _Do_ you know me?”

It’s an unexpected step back in the conversation, one Sokka hadn’t been ready for, and he can’t say it doesn’t sting a little. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way, I promise. It’s just that sometimes it feels like I’ve known you forever, but then I total up the days we’ve actually spent together and it’s not very many.”

“Well, yeah, but sometimes you can just… get people.”

“I know.” She shakes her head. “Maybe I’m overthinking it. It was just a weird thing to realize.”

“Well, short time or not, it was enough that you knew I’d find you,” Sokka says, but a half-second later he’s seized by doubt. “Unless… that wasn’t true.”

“I meant that. I wasn’t about to lie to you when you were in the middle of trying to rescue me. It’s just a little more complicated than that.”

He reaches out for her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “So tell me.”

Suki’s expression goes unreadable for a second, back to staring at the horizon, but then she says, “I believed you’d come for me. I really did. But there were bad days when I thought… I don’t know. I guess I wondered if I’d ever make it outside again, because even if you did try to rescue me, so much could’ve gone wrong. Sometimes I almost hoped you didn’t come because I couldn’t watch you die.”

“I was always gonna find you. No matter how long it took.”

“I know. But some days I hoped you didn’t, because then I could keep believing in something. If you got killed trying to rescue me… that would have been it.”

“That’s…”

“Yeah, it’s dark, I know.”

“No, I mean- well, yeah, it is dark, but I get it.” And he thinks he does. He thinks he’d feel the same way, honestly, if it was Suki or Katara or his dad or anyone else risking their lives to save him. It’s something he’d never voice to the rest of the group, too much to put on the people he tries to protect, but it feels safe in the space between the two of them. “I can’t imagine not having anything to do but sit there and think about that.”

“Can’t say I recommend it,” Suki says, and she’s clearly trying to keep her tone light, but it’s not working all that well. There’s too much strain in her voice for that.

“If you wanna tell somebody about that, I know a guy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“His name is Wang Fire. He’s the personal therapist to the Avatar.”

“I don’t know the backstory there, but I’m gonna guess it’s you in disguise,” Suki says, with just the faintest hint of a smile.

“You… would be absolutely correct. But in my defense, I rock a good fake beard.”

Suki makes a show of studying him. “I think I like you okay without it.”

“Okay, well, I’m a little hurt. But the point is, I’ve got two functioning ears and nowhere else to be.”

Suki turns her eyes to the horizon again instead, swinging her legs so her heels kick back against the stone. “I don’t know what there is to say, honestly. I sat in a cell and I tried not to lose my mind. I tried to keep some structure at first, and I’d do some training or try to plan an escape or whatever, but it wears you down after a while. I’d have entire days of just staring at the ceiling trying to remember how to even feel like myself.”

And yes, okay, logically Sokka knows that he hadn’t known where she was, but that doesn’t mean the guilt of not breaking her out sooner doesn’t make it feel hard to breathe. He wants her to keep talking, though, because hopefully getting it all out will do some good, so he just squeezes her hand and waits for her to continue.

“The other prisoners didn’t mess with me or anything- one of them did tell me they thought it was cool that I was an enemy of the state as a teenager, so that was kind of funny- but we weren’t exactly friends, either. It was just… really lonely. I’ve never spent that much time away from the other Warriors, let alone completely on my own.”

“I really can’t imagine. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not like it’s your fault.”

“If I ever figure out something better to say in a situation like this, I’ll let you know. Probably become world famous for it, honestly. I think there’s a real market.”

“Don’t forget me when you’re a celebrity.”

“I could never.” Sokka hesitates for a second, unwilling to shatter the little bit of lightness in the conversation, but he needs to ask the thing he’s been too afraid of. “Azula said- she said something about you being her favorite prisoner. She made it sound like she’d- I don’t know, hurt you, or at least was out there being horrible to you. Was that true, or was that just to throw me off?” Suki hasn’t mentioned it, sure, but maybe it was the type of thing that was too awful to talk about. That’s what it had been in his nightmares, at the very least.

Suki shakes her head. “She was messing with you. She wasn’t pleasant when I got captured or anything, but I didn’t have information she wanted. Once she figured that out, I wasn’t worth her time, and she definitely wasn’t going all the way out to the Boiling Rock for my sake.”

Suddenly, Sokka can breathe a little easier. “I really hoped, just- it’s Azula. Even Toph doesn’t know when she’s lying.”

Suki frowns. “Is Toph… supposed to know when she’s lying?”

“Oh, right. You weren’t there for that, but yeah. Turns out she can tell when someone’s lying because their heartrate picks up.”

“Didn’t know that was possible, but that’s kind of just an everyday thing at this point.”

Sokka sighs. “Tell me about it.”

They sit in silence for a little while longer, but this time there’s less tension to it, not nearly as much hanging in the balance and waiting to be spoken. Maybe Sokka does feel less like he knows the girl next to him than he used to, but maybe that’s not a bad thing, because if he’s lucky he’ll get to know her. He has to believe they’ll have time, after the war. He has to believe they'll make it until after the war. 

“Thanks for coming to find me,” Suki says after a while.

“Feel any better?”

“A little.”

“For what it’s worth, I still think you’re the coolest, bravest, toughest person I know.”

She tips her head onto his shoulder. “You’re sweet.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Oh yeah? When?”

“Uh. By you, right now.”

“You’re also ridiculous.”

Sokka turns and kisses the top of her head. “I can live with that.”

**Author's Note:**

> like I said in the tags I will address the fact that suki was a teenager in a high security prison or die trying. I may have died trying. but someone needed to. 
> 
> also like. I know it's a possibility that azula did actually do something to suki, but I didn't really get the vibe that that was the case- she's a busy imperialist, she's got things to do, and the implication is enough to hurt sokka, so why expend the effort? for sure a "your mileage may vary" thing though. anyway if you've read both this fic and this incomprehensible author's note I owe you my life and I hope you have a great day.


End file.
